My friend wants to buy an HTPC. I asked around the forum for advice but in the end people were arguing with one another. What one person said was enough others disagreed. In the end I came up with something but after adding up the prices of all the parts it turns out to be around $500. I saw on another site an already built desktop is also around $500 so I was thinking of just buying that.

I tried this very thing and watching 1080p mkv files was quite painful and got quite choppy. This was with a q6600 with 4gb ddr3.

I bought a geforce gt 420 and things were far smoother

So ymmv

Well with that Q6600 it was one of those old onboard chips, while that i3 has the graphic processor built in the CPU itself rather the on the mobo - and which is quite decent and will easily play 1080p vids.

Well with that Q6600 it was one of those old onboard chips, while that i3 has the graphic processor built in the CPU itself rather the on the mobo - and which is quite decent and will easily play 1080p vids.

I have the i3 2100 with 8GB ram on a cheaper asus m-atx board (can't remember exact model). I play very high bitrate think 30+Mbps without any issue. You will have zero issue with that. If you do end up having some issues your problem would lie with codecs and not the hardware.

I believe that the only thing you can't do is 3D blurays, but even that I'm not 100% certain about. I use mine with a media portal front-end and it runs great playing anything I throw at it.

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